


Love Letters on His Skin

by 221b_hound



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Schmoop, Writing on Skin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-11
Updated: 2013-03-11
Packaged: 2017-12-04 23:43:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/716421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This latest effort is not from the Guitar Man universe. Instead, atlinmerrick and I got to chatting about her story <a href="http://atlinmerrick.livejournal.com/70563.html">Canvas</a>, and then she linked to <a href="http://steamysherlocksmut.tumblr.com/post/43834476062/prettyarbitrary-last-night-theyd-shaken">this picture of John with writing all over his skin</a>, which has inspired some Minutae stories for her. She then challenged me to write a words-on-skin story too. Does this make it a meme now?</p><p>I was going to write it next week. It happened today instead. It's kind of schmoopy. I hope you like it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love Letters on His Skin

Sherlock learned a lot about himself from other people when he was small: that he was a genius; that he was a sociopath – that he was _not right_.

He learned those lessons early and often, along with others more subtle. He learned that he was a freak and that he was unwelcome. He learned that he was strange, unfeeling and unlovable. Everyone told him so, from Father to the children at school.

So, for all of Sherlock’s screen of sarcasm, surety and arrogance, it took John Watson less than a week to realise that although Sherlock Holmes knew himself to be a genius and above the whole world (well, except for Mycroft) in matters of intellect, he did not believe himself to be much else. Not much that was good, anyway.

John Watson set himself the task of disabusing Sherlock Holmes of the notion that the only terms that applied to him were variations of ‘genius’ and ‘freak’.

He started by calling him ‘amazing’ and ‘brilliant’, said in unfeigned admiration. He continued with ‘idiot’ and ‘git’, said with unfeigned affection (though sometimes, yes, a little exasperation).

John and Sherlock became flatmates. They became friends. They became soul brothers and at last soul mates.

Sherlock loved the words that John used to describe him. He didn’t believe most of them, but he drank them up anyway, starved for words that painted a picture of him as something more than intellect and strangeness. He would have told you he was perfectly satisfied as being that picture, but he would have been lying, to himself most of all.

It’s hard when you love someone who sees so little good in themselves. It hurts. It makes you want to sink into their skin and take all the poison out, leaving only goodness in your wake. But John knows you can’t reshape someone’s heart like that.  You can’t even say it, sometimes. It sounds wrong in words out of your mouth, like you’re trying too hard.

That didn’t stop John trying other ways to tell Sherlock the wider truth about himself, that: _Yes, Sherlock, you are a genius. Yes, you are unique. You are strange and wonderful, but that is not the half of it. It is not the least fraction of who you are._

So this is what John did.

He wrote love letters. On those rare days that the great detective fell into exhausted sleep, and nothing roused him for hours on end, John took a pale brown marker pen and in small, careful shapes, wrote other truths on Sherlock’s skin. He wrote them lightly, softly, in mirrored writing so that Sherlock could see them reflected back at him.

Sherlock noticed the very first time John did it. Of course he did. He is a genius, and the most observant man on the planet.  John had already gone to the clinic for an early shift, and Sherlock was shaving when he spotted the discoloration on his right wrist. He looked at it, frowned, and held it up to the mirror. He could read it backwards on his skin, of course, but he wanted to see what it looked like as intended in the glass.

Across the wrist of his bowing hand, John had written ‘lyrical’.

Sherlock rubbed at the word with his thumb, remembering last night, when he had played the violin for four hours straight, the first three and a half full of disjointed swirls and cadences, shrieks and wails, rises and falls, until he had lighted upon the solution to the vexing case and the notes turned suddenly to music, a culmination of a riddle unraveled. Sherlock had texted the resolution to Lestrade, and taken John to bed, continuing the celebratory rhythms through their bodies. It had been most satisfactory.

And he awoke to ‘lyrical’ on his wrist.

Then, after a moment, he noticed the word ‘intuitive’ written across the back of his left hand.

He asked about it that night. “Why did you write those words on me, John?” He was annoyed as well as puzzled. Annoyed because he was puzzled.

“Because they’re true,’ said John, kissing Sherlock’s hands and wrist, “I love the way you play. I love the way you think and how you express it with your violin. Lyrical and intuitive.” More kissing, hands, wrists, the gentle sucking of fingertips and John took the opportunity to tell Sherlock good things about himself with his body, then, his mouth and hands writing other words in a universal language, and Sherlock’s body said them back. It was good. It was _fantastic_. It may have driven Mrs Hudson to turn up the radio for a while, as she blushed and grinned and shook her head at her boys.

A week later, a difficult case had led to four sleepless nights. Sherlock had talked out loud, to John, to the skull, to the air, trying to pull the mystery apart and reassemble it in some kind of order. He did it, of course. He’s a strange genius. Then he slept like the dead for ten hours.

Sherlock went from bed to the sitting room wearing nothing but a sheet, not stopping by a mirror, so it took him a little longer to notice the new message. He caught a glimpse of it in the window, that evening, his own frowning face cast back at him, the word ‘mellifluous’ written in pale brown Texta beneath his larynx. He shifted the sheet, wondering if the word was alone, to find ‘elegant’ and ‘loquacious’ written down the tendons of his long neck.

When asked, John just smiled, kissed the places where the words had been (Sherlock had scrubbed them off) and said ‘I love listening to your voice. Not as much as you do sometimes, but I do. I love your voice.’ He proceeded to remove the sheet by tantalizing degrees, and to encourage that voice to become lost in broken sounds and incoherent cries for the better part of an afternoon. (Mrs Hudson began to consider the installation of some kind of soundproofing. Or better ear plugs.)

The messages continued, sporadically. Usually just after a case, when Sherlock was worn to exhaustion after sleepless days and nights. He would awake with little love letters on his skin. Some were easy to find. Some it took him hours to notice. He took to stripping and searching his body in front of a mirror whenever the circumstances seemed to warrant it.

Over the months, these are the messages he found.

Over the bony ridge of his left temple, ‘astonishing’ and of his right, ‘insightful’.

Over his left wrist ‘imaginative’ and behind his right knee, ‘complex’.

On his left hip, ‘sweet’ and above his navel, ‘responsive’.

Down his spine, in large letters over the thoracic and lumbar curves, ‘fearless’, leading to ‘sassy’ on one buttock and ‘scrumptious’ on the other.

Below his lower lip, ‘kissable’ and above his cupid’s bow, ‘sharp’.

Once, when Sherlock had kept vital information too close to his chest and left John in the dark – and was nearly stabbed as a result – he rose to find ‘secretive’ on his right shoulder and ‘stubborn’ on his left, and between them, across his sternum, ‘resolute’. His right pectoral muscle bore the label ‘idiot’ and his left, ‘precious’.

Sherlock punched someone one day, for coming terrifyingly close to drowning John in the Serpentine. John was fine, of course. The miscreant needed stitches. Sherlock woke to find ‘incisive’ and ‘shielding’ below his bruised and scraped knuckles.

After one particularly difficult case, involving sordid elements and a drug overdose, he found the word ‘cherished’ written over and over and over again across the old needletrack scars of his left arm. Those words he didn’t wash off for days.

When Sherlock Holmes woke one day to find John still writing, he placed a hand over John’s and glanced down at his pale chest.

Over his heart, John had written ‘strong’, and in a spiral tracing the shape of the organ under the ribs, the word ‘beloved’, ‘beloved’, beloved’ was making its repeated way to the centre.

Sherlock kissed John, who kissed him back like there was nothing more perfect and prized in his world, and things would have gone further except that Sherlock took the marker pen from John’s hand and pushed John back onto the bed.

Slowly, deliberately, Sherlock wrote (in backwards writing) at the centre of that spiral of ‘beloveds’ on his own chest: _John Watson lives here_.

Then he pressed the nib to the left of John’s chest (over John’s heart, well below the scar that might have meant that Sherlock never met this unpredictable, endlessly wonderful doctor-soldier-adventurer-lover-soulmate) and wrote: ‘ _beloved, beloved, beloved of Sherlock Holmes’_.

Sherlock put the marker pen down on the bedside table, then kissed the place he’d inked over John’s heart.

“You make me more than I am,” he said softly.

“No, Sherlock. I just let you know you are more than you give yourself credit for.”

Then they kissed, and kissed some more, and again, and oh yes, they took it further, for a long, luscious time, and exhausted the possibilities and themselves with tenderness and passion.

When John woke the next morning, he found words written in brown marker pen all over his body – the words 'patient' and 'kind' and 'marvellous' and 'pugnacious' and 'expressive' and 'honourable' and more and more and more – and he ran his fingers over them and smiled, his eyes bright, his throat thick with emotion, at the love letters on his skin.

 


End file.
